Introducing the arts and humanities

Outline

Studying the arts and humanities

This unit is an introduction to studying the arts and humanities. It takes you through a series of exercises designed to develop your approach to study and learning at a distance and improve your confidence as an independent learner.

So this introductory unit will serve several purposes

First of all, they will give you the experience of working through study material on your own.
Secondly, this material will introduce you to, or renew your acquaintance with, the tools of study that you will need.

Distance-teaching technique

We also want to introduce you to the distance-teaching technique used in this unit, which is to offer you a point at which to stop so that you can work out your response to a question, and then read our discussion. The stopping-point is signalled as an ‘Exercise’, followed by a pause, and then ‘Discussion’. We hope that this system will give you the feel of a dialogue such as you would have in a tutorial, with tutor and other students. You will get the best results if you actively engage in the process: though it may seem tempting to read straight on to our discussion, you will be a more effective learner if you work out your response first, because you will then have something on which to measure our discussion.

We suggest also that at this point you equip yourself with a note book to use to complete exercises. Alternatively, you may wish to use the unit Forum to record your responses.

For the first dialogue, then, let me ask you a question …